CBN: We’ll continue to support non-oil exports with N500bn facility

Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), says the apex bank will continue to aggressively implement its N500 billion facility aimed at supporting the growth of the country’s non-oil exports.

He said this on Friday at the Vanguard economic summit held in Lagos.

Nigeria’s economy made a swift rebound in the 4th quarter of 2020, as it expanded by 0.11 percent, after two consecutive periods of negative growth.

The rebound in growth was largely driven by non-oil sector with both the Agriculture and ICT recording a growth of 3.42 percent and 14.7 percent respectively.

Emefiele said this will help to improve non-oil export earnings, noting that exporters will be further encouraged to repatriate their export proceeds as stipulated under our extant laws.

He said the country’s external reserves currently stands at over $35 billion and it is sufficient to cover more than 7 months of import of goods and services, even though the international rule of thumb is for reserves to cover about 3 months of imports

“Aggregate domestic credit grew by 17 percent between January and December 2020, highlighting the effects of the CBN’s intervention programs, our LDR policy 15 and accommodative lending rates by the banks. Non-performing loan ratios have fallen from 6.5 percent in January 2020 to 6.0 percent as of December 2020,” he said.

“Over the next 3 years, we will continue to encourage the banking sector to increase loans to the agriculture sector from 4 percent to 10 percent by 2024.

“Indeed, we have already seen remittances improve from a weekly average of about US$5 million before this policy, to over US$30 million per week. We believe this measure will help to significantly boost inflows of FX and create much more liquidity in that space.”